OFX Banks on Pantheon & XWP to Deliver WordPress at the Speed of Global Finance

OFX is an international money services provider powering transfers of 50+ different currencies all over the world. OFX manages over $100 billion in transfers from its eight regional offices spread across EMEA, APAC and the Americas. A public company, it has 500+ employees.

To support each region, every location had its own Sitecore website, and updates were managed by a single central web team. The content was mostly identical, but small edits had to be made to account for regional localization, which had begun to cause issues. Business-critical updates were taking too long to implement, and the complexity of their hosting infrastructure made it difficult to implement sitewide changes to quickly remedy the issue. 

“We aim to make transfers as easy as possible and rely on technology to help us deliver a great client experience. Things change fast in our business and our platform needs to enable us to make changes at speed and scale, run A/B tests and deliver those optimizations quickly,“ said Sebastian Pertosi, Head of Marketing at OFX during an interview on XWP’s Tonight Show.

Under the pressure to optimize faster while reducing maintenance costs, OFX reached out to the web agency XWP and Pantheon to explore their options for a more scalable and cost-effective solution to manage their website. Together, they outlined a list of goals: to centralize multi-region publishing, to generate content programmatically, to improve confidence in their hosting platform and to avoid downtime during migration.

Content Publishing: From Hundreds of Hours to Just Minutes

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Because OFX deals with more than 50 different currencies, internal teams were spending a lot of time creating and updating content relating to specific conversions. All of these pages share much of the same content, but each region requires a varying degree of customization. 

With all of the currencies exchanged by OFX, this meant over 3,000 pages needed to be created and maintained for a single-page template. With several templates and eight different websites to manage, it was difficult to track changes, the process was time-consuming, and content often fell out of alignment when an update was made on one site but not the others. 

To streamline publishing without downtime, XWP created a custom installation of WordPress that would enable OFX’s team to publish content to all eight regions’ sites simultaneously. This new centralized approach enabled OFX to continue reaping the SEO benefits of localized content while minimizing the opportunity for discrepancies to occur between regional versions.

The OFX web team can now maintain data for both countries and currencies from a single source of truth. The system is built to take data from one or more of these data sets and combine them programmatically to then automatically generate content for thousands of pages—all with customized SEO. 

Worry-Free Infrastructure

For OFX, any attempt at making site-wide changes came with a risk of downtime. To remedy this, OFX decided to host their new WordPress configuration on Pantheon. XWP and OFX teams took advantage of Pantheon’s enterprise-grade security and modern WebOps tools to help with the management of their infrastructure. Things like daily backups of whole sites, automated Git branch-based staging and advanced performance tools, such as New Relic, to identify issues made it easier to do advanced development, with known playbooks for success.

[With Pantheon,] we could take so many things we used to worry about off our plates. We didn’t have to worry about servers or managing a CDN, because they offered it all bundled up all in one. The product that they offer in regards to the platform has been absolutely fantastic.” 

- Sebastian Pertosi, Head of Marketing at OFX

In contrast to the complexity of their Sitecore configuration, Pantheon made website operations easy to manage. There’s no complicated infrastructure to configure, and no need to figure out a tricky CDN — it’s all ready to go with the push of a button. The shift to Pantheon also gave OFX the freedom and flexibility to experiment with their site again by taking advantage of Pantheon’s identical Dev, Test, Live environments to make code merges easy and deployments worry-free.

Freedom of Refined WordPress on Pantheon

WordPress gave OFX the flexibility and simplicity they needed to focus on building a fantastic website that was easy to optimize, maintain and update without having to worry about the operational overhead associated with Sitecore.

By adopting a “simple-first" approach to maintaining the platform, OFX can easily make modular updates without having to make foundational changes. As a result, pushing new features out to market, optimizing them and giving clients new experiences have all become so much quicker, driving efficiency and empowering their teams to act faster.

Part of that simplification was even roles and permissions inside the platform. We’ve really empowered the team to go in and do whatever they want. We know that the guardrails are in place so that they’re not going to break things or accidentally bring the site down or anything like that,” Sebastian Pertosi, Head of Marketing, OFX

The refined experience of WordPress, the freedom of GPL/Open Source licensing, and the reduced total cost of ownership have made WordPress a win-win outcome for OFX.  

Migration without Downtime

For a fintech leader like OFX, website availability is of paramount importance. Even momentary downtime when shifting to a new CMS isn’t a simple matter – it can be catastrophic. XWP needed to develop a solution where they could gradually transition to WordPress and Pantheon without any interruption in OFX’s availability. 

XWP set up a gradual rollover strategy that was executed over several months. Content experiences were migrated one cluster at a time, and users were gradually re-directed from the pre-existing Sitecore instance towards the shiny new WordPress version on Pantheon. By taking the time to carefully plan and execute the migration, OFX’s transition was seamless. Browsers and search engines saw ofx.com as “one site,” even though two separate applications were powering the network.

The flexibility of the new solution designed by XWP, backed by the power and performance of Pantheon’s WebOps platform, has enabled the OFX web team to update existing content more easily, launch new campaigns at pace and go further than ever before. 

Pushing things out to market, optimizing, giving the clients new experiences — all of that has become so much quicker because we’ve simplified everything down. It’s partnering with XWP to provide our specialist WordPress resources, and with Pantheon for our hosting that has driven that change.”

- Sebastian Pertosi, Head of Marketing at OFX